A woman in California has developed a thriving business by creating and selling wedding cake toppers for diverse ethnic groups--including gays. She tried a year or two ago to get her merchandise included in Macy's wedding registry offerings, and Macy's turned her down flat.
Now that gay marriage is legal in California, however, Macy's jumped at the chance to add her product line to its wedding registry offerings. So much so that it took out a million-dollar full page ad in several of the state's largest newspapers to trumpet the fact.
Macy's has decided that it stands to make more money from courting the gay marriage market than it stands to lose by doing the same. Morality doesn't enter into it. Macy's is after the most money possible . . . all in the best interests of its shareholders, of course [she added, sarcastically--Ed] . . . and so will take advantage of whatever new business the change in California's law brings it. If that's not greed, I don't know what is.
What I don't know is why more people cannot or will not recognize that for what it is: naked opportunism. We really should either regulate our businesses to make them comply with our stated moral goals, or give up claiming we believe in one thing but acting like we believe in the exact opposite. I can't stand the hypocrisy.
Consider also the case of General Motors and its negotiations with the United Auto Workers in the 1950s. Walter Reuther, head of the union, suggested that GM come to Washington with him and lobby Congress to make health care for its workers (and by extension, everyone) a governmental responsibility, thus reducing GM's costs and responsibilities under the union contracts. Well, the dim bulbs at GM turned him down flat: (1) it's SOCIALISM [oh, horrors--Ed.]; (2) as the contracts were written, GM was out nothing, because it just passed all those costs along to those who bought its cars. "We don't care about anyone else--we are taking care of our own--and at your expense, so it's no skin off our noses," nicely sums up GM's attitude.
The upshot? GM is now paying for the health care expenses of workers who retired decades ago. Because GM never realized that it was going to have to compete in the auto sales market with higher quality, less expensive imports, GM never realized it was going to have to start eating those health care costs. And now Detroit is the heart of the Rust Belt, suffering unconscionably high unemployment, and GM as a corporation is losing money hand over fist and is no longer the world's biggest car company.
It would have been, and still is, much cheaper for everyone in the country to get health care from one provider than what we're suffering through now. Don't kid yourselves: GM's troubles hurt all of us, as declining sales increase unemployment and decrease demand for both new cars and car parts and thus ripple throughout the entire US economy.
The real reason people are against universal, single-payer health care is because they think it's going to cost them more than they'd otherwise have to pay. [We're back to greed as motivator.--Ed.] They are wrong about that for two reasons. (1) It doesn't matter how many people in your family lived to ripe old ages and died peacefully in their sleep and never saw a doctor till the day they died--it takes only ONE catastrophic illness or injury to wipe you out financially. There's no guarantee that you won't have such an illness or injury, either. You can plan and prepare and do everything right and still get hammered. (Look at what happened to me, if you doubt it.) John Lennon was right about this: "Life is what happens while you are making other plans."
(2) Everyone already is paying higher costs then they would under a single-payer system that covers everyone. Since those costs are indirect, however, people don't realize they are paying them. The simplest example (as cited by Roger Lowenstein in a recent NPR interview about his book While America Aged) is Starbucks Coffee. Starbucks pays more every year for its workers' health care costs than it pays for coffee beans, which are the sine qua non of its business. Starbucks is not paying those health care costs out if its own pockets. It's adding them into the price it charges you for those lattes you drink every day. You are already paying . . . you just don't realize that you are nor how much you are.
The reason a single-payer, truly universal health care system would be less expensive to all of us is that a single payer can negotiate rates for everyone, as opposed to Starbucks' negotiating rates for its workers, and GM for its, and every other employer's for its. [You'd also know exactly how much you were paying, because you'd be able to see the entirety, not just your part of it--Ed.]. To use a crafts metaphor, a single piece of fabric is both more uniform and stronger than a patchwork of pieces loosely stitched together. It's not socialism. It's sensible. Heaven help us if we don't recognize it and fix things soon.
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